A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

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Summary: Consciousness (sentience) and intelligence exist at all levels of our organism, not just in the brain/mind. i.e. each nerve, each muscle cell, each organ, each "system" of the body has an intelligence and consciousness (or sentience) of its own - as (likewise) do all living organisms.

The balance of meetinmg both the internal metabolic neeeds whilst also attending-to and responding to the external environmental – requires significant coordination of complex, inherently chaotic physiological systems. The new science of Biosemiotics [1] has analysed the process of communication and meaning-making in detail and found it so inherently complex – that both consciousness (sentience) and intelligence must necessarily exist at all levels of our organism, not just in the brain/mind. There is multi-layered communication and meaning-making at all levels of biology: i.e. each nerve, each cell, each organ, each "system" of the body, even each organelle within a single cell, has an intelligence and consciousness of its own - the interactive multi-layered totality of which might be called the "body-mind". [3].

Characteristics such as self-identity, decision-making, memory and intelligence may be observed even in the behaviour of single cells and plants [2]. So these attributes that are normally copnsidered to be characteristically “human” are present (though in less complex manifestations) in even the smallest of life-forms. They were present from the very beginnings of evolution. And biological Life of every kind has evolved within an innate internal and external (companion, symbiotic and ecosystem) conscious intelligent framework from the very start.

These cellular organic consciousnesses can be in several states, such as :

1. sense of be-ing
2. aware of themselves / sense of self
3. aware of other in a relational manner (symbiont, prey, predator, neutral co-existant, environmental barriers and gradients). This relationship always has direction [4]
4. recognising themselves to be part of a greater whole (e.g. trees in a forest / landscape) or your liver in your body. The scale of this awareness (how big is the greater whole) is to (maybe, to some extent?) constrained by the awareness of the organism. But just as “Self” is a specific sense, it may be that there is also a sense of universal that is accessible to all of Life - such as the experience we call Awe.
5. self-referential awareness (more than one internal frame of reference, e.g. "myself and my body" or "my adult and my inner child", or "part of me likes this but another part doesn’t"),
6. and maybe something else, or none of these
7. and maybe two or several of these simultaneously.

… creating an almost infinite number of possible relational configurations.

The possibilities are contained/constrained by the form (the anatomy and the physical, neurological, sensory, biochemical, mechanical etc. processes - also by complexity and physical size). Whilst the form constricts the ways that consciousness may interrelate to express itself, there is an almost infinite potential for changes in self-referential organisation within something that appears to be limited and fixed by its physicality. Form is after all part of the biological self-identity, in that every living thing adapts its responses (adaptations) to the world based on iots capacity for sensing. meaning-making, physiological adaptive capacity and the movements available to it through its form.

The more general issue of consciousness extends out from in-dividuals to the whole cosmos. Jung was only one of many psychologists, philosophers, physicists (and more recently semioticists) who have recognised the necessity for an extended field (or something of that ilk) of a base-level of consciousness that permeates everything [5].

When speaking of waking consciousnes in contrast to the subconscious or the body-mind, the very idea of consciousness is extremely ill-defined. Since I take the position that everything is conscious - exactly what is "waking connsciousness""?? Many qualitative aspects - and all sensory aspects - of everyday conscious experience come from innately biological levels that are not normally (in ourt particular culture) considered conscious at all - so fuzzy and ill-conceived is the common way of thinking of consciousness. Perhaps the closest we can come outside a whole library if philosophical discussions is to say that waking consciousness is the decision-making, discerning layer of conscious activity that can normally potentially exercise free will. Free will is itself a very difficult-to-define concept when one starts to explore the rabbit hole it lives in. Perhaps the answer to this is (somewhat tautologically) - that waking consciousness is the part of our being whose task is to exercise free will (and so overturn reactive gestalts) in order to better-calibrate the whole organism to its real circumstances. Thus, the exercise of free will is a subset of the sense / meaning-making / response loop.